"Anti-government sentiment in the United States has risen and fallen in different eras. During the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, U.S. government programs were expanded; Social Security and Medicare came into being, artists and the arts received federal support, the plight of poor American children was addressed on several fronts, and the Southern system of racial apartheid was gradually but dramatically dismantled. It was this last intervention that roused anti-government feeling in many white Americans. They were particularly outraged when Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy called out the National Guard to enforce racial integration of public educational institutions.

Because of President Obama, racial animosity still fuels anti-government fervor, but it is ultimately subservient to another agenda entirely. American libertarians are far less concerned with human rights and liberties than are classical anarchists or liberals. A few libertarians advocate the legalization of marijuana, but the majority would happily impose overt displays of Christian belief on government officials, ban birth control and abortion, and perpetrate 4th-Amendment-violating searches and seizures upon anyone any official deemed suspicious. Thus, although contemporary anti-government rhetoric may indeed owe something to individualist anarchism, from Max Stirner and his Eigentum via Ayn Rands selfishness, that intellectual inheritance has a convoluted lineage."

In an effort to understand the tea party here are three more pieces for the political wonks in the crowd. Interesting comments on the way the constitution is used today with no idea of the situation that backgrounded the document.

'Constitutional heresies'

"Professor Klarman made four main points about what he calls "constitutional idolatry." They are (1) that the framers' Constitution represented values that Americans should abhor or at least reject today; (2) that there are parts of the Constitution America is stuck with but that are impossible to defend based on contemporary values; (3) that for the most part the Constitution is irrelevant to the current political design of the nation; and (4) that the rights that are protected today are mostly a result of the evolution of political attitudes, not of courts using the Constitution to uphold them."

The Tea Partys goofy fetish for amending the Constitution. By Bradford Plumer

"It seemed unthinkable that Vaughn Ward wouldnt, someday, be a U.S. congressman. The decorated Iraq war vet had been handpicked by national Republicans to run against endangered Democrat Walt Minnick for Idahos first congressional district. Although he was somewhat gaffe-prone (he had an unfortunate tendency to plagiarize campaign speeches from sources like Barack Obama, for instance), Ward had the boyish good looks, the résumé, andbest of all, for one of the reddest states in the countrySarah Palins blessing. All he had to do was win a GOP primary against Raul Labrador, a relatively young state legislator. What could go wrong?"

Could this be today? Sure could. And Hofstadter was writing about the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

"Such tendencies in American Life as isolationism and the extreme nationalism that usually goes with it, hatred of Europe and Europeans, racial, religious, and nativist phobias, resentment of big business, trade-unionism, intellectuals, the eastern seaboard and its culture - all these have been found not only in opposition to reform but also at times oddly combined with it. One of the most interesting and least studied aspects of American Life has been a frequent recurrence of the demand for reforms, many of them aimed at the remedy of genuine ills, combined with strong moral convictions and with a choice of hatred as a kind of creed." Richard Hofstadter circa 1955, 'The Age of Reform'

Rather than start more and more tea party threads I am adding interesting pieces to existing threads as they seem to fit or not.

This piece is interesting on a number of levels, white poverty in America and media creation and use of the tea party. Bageant makes an interesting point in claiming we have lost the language of protest or Americanism.

'Tea Party is just a media spectacle'

""The Tea Party is a media spectacle to make working people believe they have power," Joe Bageant said during an interview on RT, a global television network based in Moscow, Russia.

On The Alyona Show, host Alyona Minkovski starts the interview by pointing out that 43 million Americans live below the poverty line. "For some reason," she says, "in this country, there's always been an assumption that the poor, or the underclass, are the non-white people that live in this country, and the fact that there has always been a white underclass has become taboo.""

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